Hydrogen Fuel Cell Breakthrough?

Monday, April 9, 2013, I will be attending a private demonstration of a hydrogen fuel cell using catalytic carbon for producing hydrogen-for-fuel. This is the world’s first scalable Hydrogen-On-Demand process requiring minimum power input.

An important characteristic of this new breakthrough is that it requires no external power input after the hydrogen-producing reaction is started, making possible, for the first time, the scale-up to high rates of hydrogen on demand (HOD) using water and scrap materials for fuel.

A growing number of equipment manufacturers are planning the commercialization of this new low-cost, safe method for producing hydrogen fuel at high flow rates by extracting hydrogen from water, using scrap paper and scrap aluminum, two of the world’s safest and lowest-cost industrial materials. Phillips Company will use a worldwide central licensing agent to rapidly license this new technology.

Experts agree that hydrogen will command a key role in future renewable energy. For years, the world’s clean-energy goal has been to have a relatively cheap, safe, efficient and non-polluting means of producing hydrogen on demand, at very high rates which make hydrogen storage tanks unnecessary. That goal has been met, for the first time, with a new process using safe, low-cost materials.

Research resulted in the discovery that scrap aluminium and scrap paper, when burned, can be subjected to an inexpensive catalytic activation process. Then, this mixture can effectively generate hydrogen gas from water. The process uses more water than scrap materials, and the scrap materials do not have to be pure, making the fuel less expensive.

The hydrogen production can operate in pH-neutral water, even if it is dirty, and can operate in sea water, the most abundant source of hydrogen on earth. The unique thing: This is the world’s first method that can produce more energy from the burning or combustion of hydrogen than the small amount of energy required to generate the hydrogen.

Hydrogen is an energy dense and clean fuel, which upon combustion releases only water vapor. Today, most hydrogen is produced from thermoforming and electrolysis. Those methods require large amounts of electrical energy and/or result in excessive carbon dioxide emissions. An alternative, clean method is to make hydrogen from water.

The new process is called CC-HOD, or Catalytic Carbon, Hydrogen on Demand. Before this new process was developed, the use of hydrogen fuel was limited by the lack of a cheap catalyst that can speed up the generation of hydrogen from water. The new catalytic process is based on chemistry theory that is developed and ready for commercialization. “

These applications are now possible because this process is the world’s first method that can be scaled up to produce hydrogen on demand at very high flow rates using catalytic carbon to limit the input energy to only a small amount. Because the hydrogen-producing process uses pH-neutral chemistry, the hardware corrosion problems are virtually nil.

“Introduction of this new technology will first be used as a fuel supplement to increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of existing petroleum fuels. This can be done without modification to existing engines in any way apart from introducing the hydrogen into the air intake manifold of the engine. This has been demonstrated by using hydrogen as a fuel additive in conventional automobiles to increase the mileage (miles per gallon) by more than 30% with no modification to the engine,” said a company spokesman.

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Sounds like they are using lye and aluminum to make hydrogen. This isn't new.

any-mouse on April 11 2013 said:

So how long will it take big corporations and the Govt to buy up/steal the rights to this technology as they have others and make it disappear???

amos033 on April 17 2013 said:

We have been using Hydrogen on Demand for a few years now with technology already in the market place and regularly receive gains of 30% increase in mpgs, 10% increase in HP and 85% decrease in harmful emissions from water.

Ken Brown on April 27 2013 said:

If this means taking profits away from oil companies...it will never see the light of day.